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Mac Hardware Requirements

by Theo Brinkman · in General Discussion · 03/02/2005 (5:10 pm) · 2 replies

I'm planning to grab a copy of TGE and T2D as soon as I can afford a new system for development, so I was wondering if anybody could clue me in on what, exactly, the Mac Hardware Requirements mean?

TGE says:
MAC OS-X
G3 +, 64 MB RAM
OpenGL Compatible 3D Graphics Accelerator
Supported Compilers: Project Builder (OS-X only)

T2D says:
MAC OSX
G3 +, 64MB RAM
OpenGL compatible 3D Graphics Accelerator
Supported Compilers: XCode (OSX only). Others with community support.

I'm needing a new PC for classes, but I want to get a Mac as well. Class of systems are included in the 'OpenGL compatible 3D Graphics Accelerator' requirement? (Obviously anything *current* on the Apple site is going to be good, but it's also out of my budget after the new PC, so I'm stuck looking at older hardware on the Mac side of things. )

Can anybody help me out here?
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Torque Owner Rob Terrell
#1
03/04/2005 (9:45 am)
I'm not sure that's correct. Marble Blast Gold ships with the Mac Mini, which has 32 MB of VRAM. I played Marble Blast at the Apple Store on a Mac Mini and it played great.
And FYI, most of the Macs in our house have run other Garage Games titles, and I don't think any but my Powerbook has 64 MB of VRAM.

$500 has got to be in your price range. You can't buy a decent recent used Mac for much less. Go with the Mini and use a $50 KVM to switch between it and the PC.

Torque Owner Theo Brinkman
#2
03/04/2005 (9:57 am)
Actuall, with a bit of research on price, I'm discovering that you're correct on the price of a decent recent used Mac. Kinda disturbing, acutally. I just can't fathom how a 500MHz G4 iBook still manages to fetch $700+ when a brand new ibook has 2x the processor speed for $1000. Maybe the mini will help mke the used Mac market a bit more affordable?

I'd been reading the 64MB as system memory, which isn't much of a requirement any more, even on used systems. My real question was whether anybody knew where the low-end of 'OpenGL Compatible 3D Graphics Accellerator' was. Original iMacs? Toilet Seat (aka: Clamshell) iBooks? Newer than that? Is it just anything Apple says OSX runs on, or are there OSX supporting systems that don't meet the graphics requirement?

And yes, $500 is in my price range. In fact, my price range is about $1800, but that's for a new laptop for classes *AND* a Mac, so the $500 for the Mini does strain the budget a bit. I'm trying to stretch my budget a bit further by upgrading my current laptop where as I can and seeing how that works for (Comp. Sci) class work, but I'm not sure it'll be enough.